Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/435

 FOSTER

315

I'OSTER

September 2, 1845, the son of Benjamin Oliver and Martha Winslow Foster, but spent the earlier portion of his life in Bangor, graduating from Bow- doin in the class of 1S68, obtaining his A. M. and Ph. D. from the same college in 1870, and graduating from the Medical School of Maine in 1874.

After some additional study in New York, he practised at Bangor until 1880, and at that time, having previously been more or less interested in nervous diseases, became assistant in succession at the Insane Hospital at Taunton, Massa- chusetts, at the New Hampshire Insane Asylum at Concord, and then of the female department of the Hospital for the Insane at Washington, District of Columbia.

At each of these places he was noted for his extreme tact and his true zeal in the study of insanity. About the year 1882 he was obliged to go to the West to settle up the family estate, so continued his work in Lemare, Iowa, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

In the year 1901, the Eastern Maine Insane Asylum at Bangor being nearly completed, he accepted the position of superintendent. Busy and interest- ed in a new and thoroughly equipped hospital, he worked energetically until his sudden death in 1904. Dr. Foster was married to Miss Charlotte Eliza- beth Adams, of Weathersfield, Connec- ticut, October 31, 1871 and had three children, one of whom became a doctor. He was also a professor in mental diseases in the medical department of the Columbia University of Wash- ington, District of Columbia.

Among his numerous papers were one on "Asylum Needs," another on "The Hydro-therapeutic Treatment of the Insane" (" American Medical Jour- nal of Insanity," 1891) and one on "Mental Diseases."

Dr. Foster's charming wife was taken suddenly ill with double pneumonia December 23, 1903, and despite every possible care, she died on the twenty- eighth. Returning from her grave, Dr.

Foster was himself attacked with the same disease, and despite the best care, he also rapidly failed, and died, his death occurring on January 4, 1904.

J. A. S. Trans Maine Med. Assoc, 1904.

Foster, Thomas Albert (1827-1896).

The fifteenth child of a family of twenty-one, the son of Thomas Dres- ser and Joanna Carter Foster, he was born in Montville, Maine February 20, 1S27. His mother was left a widow when he was about eight, but when twelve Thomas was able to add to her small income by his labor. He had an ordinary education and taught school for several years, and it was not until he was twenty-six that he began to study medicine with Dr. Nathan Rog- ers Boutelle, of Waterville. While a student in 1855, he showed his steadi- ness of purpose by attending fearlessly a large number of cases of cholera at Waterville and Bangor (of which fifteen died), and he was a temporary victim himself of a mild attack, but was saved by powerful sedatives. Grad- uating at the Philadelphia Medical School in 1856, in 1858 he took a post- graduate course in medicine and settled in Portland in 1859. He served briefly during the Civil War, and was after- wards appointed chief pension ex- aminer. He was a member of the Maine Medical Association, once serving as its president, and was instructor in an- atomy and physiology in the Portland School for Medical Instruction for sev- eral years. His large obstetric practice placed him in the front in that branch of medicine, and he was the second physician in Maine to do a successful Cesarean section.

He contributed to the "Transactions of the Maine Medical Association" nu- merous papers on obstetrics, physiology, ami mental diseases, and was also inter- ested in the co-education of the sexes. He would have been pleased to live in the twentieth century when psychical medicine has so^ boldly_come to the